CALIEDU – Project summary

The project „ Critical mass for quality education through evidence based public policies” is initiated by Learn & Vision Association in partnership with the Center for the Study of Democracy Association, is a 12 months project, starting from April 1st 2015 and it is financed through SEE 2009-2014 grants, within the NGO Fund Romania.

The implementation of this project comes as a necessity, due to the lack of coalition from the side of the NGOs in education in order to elaborate and promote public policies in education based on scientific research. All these favor the way decisions in education are made, with an obvious lack of research on the most important aspects of education (access, quality, equity), as well as the lack of any evaluation concerning the impact of new educational policies or of the introduced changes. This fact is evident also in the report Education and Training in Europe 2020 – Responses from the EU Member States (European Commission/ EACEA/ Eurydice, 2013, p. 82), which includes the specific recommendation for Romania (CSR 5) in order to reach the assumed objectives for 2020 to evaluate the impact of education reforms. Besides all these, even the few impact studies done by the Ministry of Education, they are hardly known due to the limited access.

In this context, the main goal of this project is to increase the level of participation of national and regional educational NGOs in developing fundamental educational policies based on research, through the formation of a coalition. (CALIEDU).

In the same time, the project attempts to accomplish the following objectives:
– develop the advocacy capacity of CALIEDU coalition through the instruction of at least 12 NGO members from the selected NGOs on topics like research methods in education and the elaboration of public policy cycle;
– support effective recognition of the expertise of NGOs in public policy by creating an electronic platform that provides relevant resources (research reports, research methods in education, scientific articles, position papers) for the stakeholders and promotors of educational policies; as well as to facilitate communication between different involved factors in elaboration, promotion and implementation of educational policies (including teachers);
– promote, through a CALIEDU position paper and through an advocacy campaign, the need for grounding all political decisions in education on research results, including impact studies on policies and strategies for implementation after Romania joined EU;

The direct beneficiaries of this project are the 12 NGOs selected for the formation of CALIEDU coalition, together with their members and volunteers. Around this NGOs coalition another group of beneficiaries consist of at least 12 key education public institutions (we include organizations such as ARACIP, The Institute of Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, universities, inspectorates and CCPs). In addition, though the online platform and the other dissemination instruments, at least 2% of all the teachers in Romania (approximately 4500 persons) will have access to different research designs and models in education, as well as other necessary resources for their scientific and methodological initiatives